I don't really know what goes on in the head of editorial page editors and the like when they seek out intentionally unconstructive contrarian views with which to fill their newspapers. I'm all for narrative diversity, but that doesn't mean I want to read editorials about the sun revolving around the Earth. Anyhow, reading the Washington Post ed page has been an especially bile-churning exercise in self-punishment lately (and I'm not the only one who thinks so). So was the case this weekend with the Post's inexplicable high-profile placement of environmental uber-skeptic Bjorn Lomborg's Chill Out piece in Sunday's Outlook section.

There are lots of critiques of Lomborg's less-than-scientific approach, so I will leave you to spin through them at your leisure.

To me, it's the fact that Lomborg's piece is featured -- without a dissenting voice -- in such a prominent place in the Post that says so much. It seems that merely because Lomborg acknowledges warming is caused by people -- and despite the fact that he doesn't seem to care -- he is allowed to make almost any claim imaginable. Many of the claims he does make are in dispute. But his central argument reminds me of ones we hear from foreign aid skeptics: There are a lot of problems, and all your ideas for solving them are rubbish. Foreign aid skeptics like Bill Easterly don't debate the existence of children dying of malaria, AIDS or TB. It's just that he deems the whole system designed to get medicine to the child wildly inefficient, full of waste and fraud and throwing the whole thing out is the only way to fix it. This bombastic approach works for global warming skeptics as well. Sure, we're warming the globe. But spending a billions to reduce emissions won't work. Stop trying, and instead celebrate the small victories, such as fewer death from cold (seriously).

Lomborg's alternative argument goes like this: reducing the main cause of warming within the confines of our current system will be too expensive; instead, spend all that money on finding new technology to entirely change the way we consume energy and emit pollution. Basically, make a new system, don't clean and fix the old one.

The problem with both of these skeptical approaches is that the world doesn't work in the binary system. Tossing out the current foreign aid system so you build a new one you love means schools get closed, kids die of diarrhea, AIDS treatments don't get administered, food doesn't get distributed, chaos and need mingle unnecessarily. Easterly and others like him know this won't be allowed to happen, and they can happily continue lobbing bombs at foreign aid while it does what it does: sloppily, inefficiently, but undeniably help some people.

However, Lomborg and other climate skeptics perhaps don't realize the power they hold. I favor innovation -- I would go so far as to agree that a completely new way of using energy will be the key to solving our long-term climate problems. But I can't look into the eyes of my child and say, "Here's hoping the scientists find a way to save this planet for you, because I think coal-burning energy plants shouldn't have to obey the Clean Air Act since it will cost so much." Lomborg's excuse-making makes it easy for policy-makers and polluters to wash their hands of the pressing problem of climate change and instead pin their hopes on a breakthrough that may come too late to save the world we've come to know.

Incidentally, we wrote a week or so ago about Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger and their new book about the future of environmentalism and everything else. Joseph Romm at Gristmill makes a convincing argument that Shellenberger and Nordhaus are having the same negative effect as Lomborg on the medium-term hopes of blunting the impact of human-made warming.
Flickr photo by Dreth57 used under Creative Commons permission.